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The Great Island
also because he wrote about ordinary people, not heroes and freaks.
Kazantzakis is as different from Kondylakis as chalk from cheese,
for he lacks the relaxation, the easy-going accuracy and the deliberately
confined scale of Kondylakis. Kazantzakis was always trying to
escape from confines. He is one of those figures who, annoyingly but
hardly through their own fault, turn readers into aggressive partisans.
Some (very often foreigners) will hear no ill of him. Others condemn
him out of hand. I find this particularly irritating because it seems so
clear that both sides are wrong, and that Kazantzakis was a successful,
even a great, novelist, but a rotten philosopher. The rotten philosophy
unfortunately pervades his epic Odyssey. When Odysseus asks the worldfamous
prostitute Margaro for the highest fruit of her experience and
wisdom, she tells him,
‘When on my knees I hold the man I love, I cry:
“Beloved, I feel at length that we two are but one!” ’
And Odysseus replies, ‘Even this One, O Margaro, this One is empty
air!’ a conclusion which shatters her, and which is in fact drawn from
Kazantzakis’s Spiritual Exercises. It is lucky that Kazantzakis kept this
sort of stuff out of the novels. The truth is that he was an intellectual
magpie, who went through life picking up authors and theories in
turn and taking from each what he could, so that his thought is a hashup
of Nietzsche, Bergson and many others. The story of his struggle for
enlightenment is more interesting than the resulting philosophy.
Kazantzakis was born in Heraklion in 1883. He travelled enthusiastically
all over the world and wrote many travel books including one
about England. His life was a battle, and he saw everything in terms
of struggle; hence it was natural that he thought also in terms of heroes
and great men pitted against odds, and identified himself now with
one, now with the other. In 1929 he wrote that his own leader was not
one of the three archetypal leaders of the human spirit, Faust, Hamlet
and Don Quixote, but the mariner Odysseus – and not the nostalgic,
home-loving Odysseus, but the Odysseus who set out from Ithaca on
new travels. Thus the Odysseus who is hero of Kazantzakis’s epic poem
is the traveller and seeker after knowledge and experience, whose prototype
is found in Dante and Tennyson.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
Kazantzakis and Tennyson make strange bedfellows, yet the urge of
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